![]() ![]() “I enjoy being a success against the odds.” ![]() He’d been paying someone to farm his land, and one day he decided, why pay someone to do work he could do himself? During off-season, the last few years of his career and for the first few years of retirement, he worked in a cattle-feeding operation. Today Den Herder lives in his home town of Sioux City, Iowa, a block from where he was born. I gave it my best shot for 12 years, and I had no more to give.” “I left with a good taste in my mouth,” said Den Herder, now 38. He was the next-to-last to retire from that team, in 1982. He was the most anonymous of the Dolphins’ famous No-Name defense, which led the team through its undefeated 1972 season. He turned into a workhorse defensive end who had a long and distinguished career. Vern Den Herder was a ninth-round draft choice from Central Iowa University who wasn’t expected to stick on the roster in 1971. “I tell my partners, ‘I’m putting - make some noise.’ “ “That’s why I’m terrible on the golf course,” he said. Yepremian notices that even today, he finds it easier to concentrate when things are loud. A kicker has to shut out thousands of screaming fans to get one shot. A lousy kick can just skim the goalpost and make a hero. Few human beings face such intense, concentrated pressure as a football kicker.Ī great kick means nothing if it’s six inches askew. Yepremian found that after 15 years of stress, it felt good to relax. He spent the first few years playing tennis and enjoying his family. But he wasn’t able to line up a job as a TV color commentator, as he’d hoped. That surprised him, because he had always been good at marketing himself. Yepremian, 43, spent some time finding a new career after his football playing days ended.
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